On Aug. 3, six boats carrying hunters from Clyde River, Nunavut, converged on a pregnant bowhead whale and, in a dramatic 90-minute struggle that saw explosions, a flurry of harpoon thrusts and the loss of one of the boats, the 60-foot-long animal was brought to heel.

It was the community’s first whale hunt in more than 100 years, and exuberant locals were still peeling muktuk (fatty skin) off the whale’s hulking carcass when congratulations flowed in from one of the most unlikely sources imaginable: Greenpeace.

The group whose name is synonymous with Save the Whales put out a press release to “honour” the people of Clyde River for taking out a mammal still considered endangered in parts of the Arctic.

“Greenpeace respects the rights of Clyde River and other indigenous communities to sustainable, traditional hunting and fishing,” said Greenpeace Arctic campaigner Farrah Khan in a statement.

The gesture is all part of Greenpeace’s new strategy to “make amends with indigenous peoples” and make common cause with them to ban Arctic oil drilling. For more than 30 years, Greenpeace’s role in the anti-sealing campaigns have made it the bitter enemy of Arctic people. Across Nunavut, the group is not only blamed for kneecapping one of the region’s only sources of income, but for driving once-proud hunters to welfare dependency and suicide.

No matter their feelings on Arctic oil, as Greenpeace returns to Canada’s North for another high-profile public relations campaign, many Inuit remain deeply suspicious of whether the group suddenly has the best interest of “indigenous peoples” in mind.

“Our young men started committing suicide in the 1970s because people couldn’t feed their families anymore,” said Rosemarie Kuptana, a former president of the Inuit Circumpolar Council, an international organization representing the world’s 160,000 Inuit.

Greenpeace, she said, has never acknowledged “that there’s a whole generation of young people today who grew up without fathers.”

Only a few years after its 1971 founding in Vancouver, Greenpeace was at the forefront of efforts to condemn the Canadian seal hunt. By 1976, Greenpeacers were venturing out onto ice to physically push seals out of the way of East Coast sealing ships. Later, they would graduate to spraying the animals with non-toxic dye to make their coats unusable.

And in 1977, the organization famously brought French actress Brigitte Bardot to Newfoundland, where she criticized seal hunters as “Canadian assassins” and posed for a series of famous photos of her snuggling a puppy-like seal on the ice.

“I think about these poor little creatures who live so peacefully, with no defence against their attackers. I feel sick,” she wrote in an account of her trip.

Driven by public pressure, Europe banned the import of whitecoat harp seal pups in 1983. Although the Inuit could still hunt, the ban demolished the market for seal skins. In some Northern communities, annual seal hunting revenue reportedly dropped from $50,000 to as low as $1,000.

“You could not find a more thoroughly discredited brand, from one end of the Arctic to the other, than Greenpeace,” said Madeleine Redfern, a former mayor of Iqaluit, writing in an email to the National Post.

“Thirty-five years after Greenpeace’s initial anti-sealing campaign, Nunavut Inuit suffer extremely high rates of malnutrition and poverty, with seven out of 10 Inuit preschoolers being food insecure,” she said.

In June, Joanna Kerr, Greenpeace Canada’s executive director, published an op-ed in the Nunatsiaq News, Nunavut’s primary newspaper, aiming to “set the record straight” on Greenpeace’s role in the seal hunt.

“Our campaign against commercial sealing did hurt many, both economically and culturally,” she wrote.

Greenpeace had “decolonized,” she said, and was now translating its materials into Gwich’in and Inuktitut, had hired “three talented, passionate indigenous women” and had drafted an official policy on indigenous rights.

Just this month, the latest celebrity delegation Greenpeace flew to the Arctic even made sure to include an aboriginal, Canadian actress Michelle Thrush. Of course, Ms. Thrush is Cree and grew up in Calgary, several hundred kilometres south of the tree line.

With Greenpeace now launching the massive campaign “protect the Arctic from the oil companies,” Ms. Kerr said it would work to “acknowledge the power of indigenous knowledge.”

Greenpeace, to be fair, has never openly opposed traditional indigenous hunts. Unlike its most radical contemporaries, such as the Sea Shepherd Conservation Society, the group’s campaigns have always been directed against commercial sealers and whalers.

In its Nunatsiaq News editorial, Greenpeace blamed other organizations and the federal government for roping “everyone into the same basket,” but nonetheless acknowledged “the role we played in the unforeseen consequences of these bans.”

This time around, though, it is the similar threat of “unforeseen consequences” that is prompting Inuit leaders to condemn Greenpeace’s overtures to make nice.

“As far as Greenpeace goes, they’re there for their own agenda and their own purposes,” said Duane Smith, president of the Inuit Circumpolar Council speaking to the National Post by phone from Ottawa.

Nunavut MP Leona Aglukkaq was more blunt in a July address to the Inuit Circumpolar Council, in which she alleged that Greenpeace was merely trying to manipulate Northerners.

“Other people who are not our friends will try to use Inuit as weapons in their own battles,” she said.

Ms. Kuptana said she shared some of Greenpeace’s concerns about oil exploration and seismic testing, but resented that it would launch an Arctic campaign without calling up a single Canadian Inuit organization.

“They don’t respect our values or our traditions or our fundamental human rights by installing this campaign without any Inuit input,” she said.

In May 2013, for instance, Greenpeace gathered together a council of various northern indigenous people to sign a document declaring “there is a growing opposition to Arctic oil drilling amongst indigenous communities.”

Although about half a dozen representatives from Canadian First Nations signed the document, the delegation did not include any Canadian aboriginals who actually occupied the Arctic Coast.

Immediately, Canadian Inuit groups at the time shot back that they wanted no part in Greenpeace’s campaign “pitting indigenous peoples against Arctic resource development.”

“Inuit have not endorsed this statement and position, which appears to be a Greenpeace-orchestrated campaign against resource development in our very own lands and waters,” said Terry Audla, president of Inuit Tapiriit Kanatami, the non-profit advocate for Canadian Inuit.

Earlier this year, however, Greenpeace received its first Inuit allies when the largely Inuit community of Clyde River enlisted the eco-organization’s help in opposing federally approved seismic testing in Baffin Bay.

“The people of Clyde River were facing a huge threat and asked Greenpeace if we would support them in their fight,” said Ms. Khan in an email to the National Post.

“We hope that through further conversations, we will find that we share values and goals with others as well,” she said.

Ms. Redfern, the former Iqaluit mayor, said the people of Clyde River had turned to Greenpeace after no other Inuit organization or leader went to bat for them, calling it “an illustration of the huge and growing gulf between Inuit and their political institutions.”

Despite this, she said she has no time for Greenpeace coming back to the North.

“Greenpeace needs an icy, sparkly backdrop for their fundraising pantomime and has appropriated an entire region,” she said. “Who cares about Inuit education, housing, health, when Greenpeace and starlets are going to ‘Save the Arctic’?”